tzlee.com/blog

  • Building a CF Card Disk Home Server

    Thought I would recycle some old systems in my house, so I dug up an ancient Book PC (Micro ATX?) running Celeron 1GHz with 128MB RAM and decided to do away with the risky hard drive that was generating lots of heat and rebuilt it with a CF card.

    Celeron 1GHz, 128MB RAM

    I got myself several IDE to CF adapters off eBay and also two unbranded 4GB CF cards. Flash disks are getting quite affordable recently and this is a good way to repurpose an ancient machine without having to spend a bomb on SSDs (and maybe a SATA controller).

    IDE (PATA) to CF

    Installed CentOS and I’m off for several hours of Yum update. I’ll turn this into a home development box and print server. No X11 (GUI) on this thing. 128MB is no longer enough to do these fancy stuff on modern distros.

    Good old Socket 7

    One thing though, I’m looking for a more efficient and low profile heat sink/fan combo for Socket 7/370. I can’t find anywhere that sells these stuff now… at least not for a decent price.

    P.S. Due to an ordering error I have two four extra IDE (PATA) to CF adapters. If you’d love to have them, please drop me a message and I’ll happily pass them to you. The wife while (true) { nags(); }takes revenge at my historical archive of  computer hardware, such as the CPU Hall of Fame below by buying more shoes and bags.

    My CPU Hall of Fame

  • No Real Use for Google Wave?

    I can’t seem to think of a very practical use for Google Wave. IMHO it’s a technology that’s neither here nor there. It’s not a very effective replacement for e-mail either as it’s not a scalable model. It’s not exactly a great collaborative tool as well though I agree maybe it has good use for taking meeting minutes and random notes. It’s certainly not a good file sharing or document editing tool.

    I’ve been thinking quite a bit on what I can really do with Wave. It’s frustrating actually 😛

    On a side note, it’s surprising how the ancient DNS and SMTP protocols we take for granted scaled so well. IETF and IEEE are a bunch of geniuses.

  • World Class Troubleshooting

    I’m sitting in a client’s office and just two cubicles away, this guy is on the phone with another guy trying to troubleshoot something.

    “Hello? Yah, yah? What is wrong?”

    Few seconds later…

    “Oh, can you go inside? Erm… edit the file?”

    Few seconds later…

    “Yah, use pico open the file.”

    One or two seconds later…

    “Pico don’t have? What you use? Nano? Don’t use nano. You try pico?”

    Few seconds later…

    “No pico? Install pico and try?”

    Few seconds later…

    “OK, you call back. Yah. OK, thanks, bye.”

    So he concluded the guy used the wrong editor? 😛 Few minutes later, he makes a call to someone else.

    “Hi, yah, er, ask you ah, how you see the Linux is 386 or 686 or x64?”

    Two seconds later..

    “Oh like that ah. Use you-name lah. OK. Then, then… like that I cannot install the 386 on 64bit lah?”

    Wahlaueh, it drives me nuts just listening to the conversation 😛 Heng I don’t have to work with these people.

  • Qualifications Speak for Nuts?

    http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/what-do-school-tests-measure/#comment-127279

    Busy at the moment. Will blog later. Link for your reading pleasure.

  • Causes App Critique

    Before I joined the CS3216 class, I promised Prof. Ben I will do his homework, so I decided I should really do it. Here’s my critique. To save him the agony, I have decided not to write a thesis and keep it short. 😛

    Anyway…

    So what is Causes?

    Technical description. It’s an application in Facebook that allows a user to make a difference by donating to a cause.

    Non-technical description. It’s something in Facebook that allows people to make a difference by donating to a cause.

    Hokay, enough of rubbish. So Causes aims to solve some problems, and in my opinion it is well positioned to solve what is known as the Social & Economic Injustice.

    Socially and economically, we have created great disparities of wealth. A minority of the world’s population (17%) consume most of the world’s resources (80%), leaving almost 5 billion people to live on the remaining 20%. As a result, billions of people are living without the very basic necessities of life – food, water, housing and sanitation.

    If the top 20% of the world’s population is 1.2 billion, then I am quite confident that Facebook users are amongst the top 5% (~300 million).

    The problem with traditional forms of donation

    The problem with traditional forms of donation are that they lack public visibility and transparency on a global scale. NPOs depend highly on volunteers to do all sorts of things like donation drives to keep them alive. There aren’t many self-sustainable foundations like Bill and Melinda Gates around. And if you haven’t forgotten the NKF saga where the infamous quote on peanuts came about, it’s obvious that we don’t really know where the money goes.

    Basic Concepts

    • The Power to Make a Difference as a Social Media. This app basically demonstrates the power of social media and that it should not be underestimated. As of this writing, the Hope for Haiti Now cause has raised US$42,930 (S$60,617).
    • The Power to Make a Difference as an Individual. Unlike traditional donations (I’m referring to the tin-can school boys and girls at MRT stations), this app allows you ample time to search for a cause that you think really matters (than somebody preaching some unknown cause to you), read all about it before you donate. The best part is that it shows you the total amount (transparency) and others who have donated (confidence).
    • Transparency. This app seems to have done a good job by naming the beneficary organization (usually registered in the US) and by reflecting the total amount donated. However, the same old problem still exists – we don’t know where the money goes.

    Technical Concepts

    • Main Navigation. Simplicity is the key. The adaptation of the Facebook UI is great, making it look clean. If you haven’t realized, clicking on Best Of brings you out of Facebook to www.causes.com which completely copied Facebook’s top bar.
    • Front Page. It seems like the front page of the Causes app has a similar concept to BOOMZcart. It recommends you potential causes and also shows the causes that your friends are participating in, but there’s some issues I observed.
      • The recommendations don’t seem to match any of my profile interests. Is it a targeted recommendation, or a random recommendation?
      • I see four causes, but they’re all the same person. It should show four unique friends instead.
    • Individual Cause Page. In my opinion this has been very well executed by mimicking Facebook’s user profile page. It provides user interaction (via Home tab), sufficient details (via About and Impact tabs), network information (via Members tab).
    • Browse Causes. Under the Find Causes navigation menu. It’s broken (returns empty page).

    Food for Thought

    • Show me the money. Beneficiary organizations should provide detailed breakdown of where the donation money went. I’m not sure if this information is easy to obtain as I’m not a US citizen.
    • Real People, Real Responses. What if somebody from the Haiti earthquake came in and said, “Thank you for your donations. My family survived the ordeal.” I would hope this to happen.

    P.S. Sorry I wrote this post in a rush and it looks abit random with broken sentences and such. Hope you can understand what I’m writing 😛

  • Wow, US is in Deeper Shit

    Two news stories on Straits Times caught my attention. You should check them out too.

    US debt to hit ceiling

    WASHINGTON – THE US debt is on track to hit a congressionally proposed debt ceiling of 14.3 trillion (S$60.6 trillion) by the end of February, the Treasury said on Wednesday, a day ahead of a key vote to raise it to that level.

    AIG to pay US$100m in bonus

    NEW YORK – BAILED out US insurance giant AIG, now 80 per cent government owned, will distribute about US$100 million (S$141 million) of bonuses to employees on Wednesday, a person close to the matter said.

    Wow, maybe the US should be charged credit-card rates for the money they owe and the Treasury folks should contact our National Council on Problem Gambling.

    And whatever the rest of the story is about justifying the $100m in bonuses is just pure BS.

    US is going downhill. Some other country will take over the world soon. They are in shit. Deep, deep shit.